Here comes da Judge

First, you might check this out: I wrote something about Aaron Judge over on MLB. The basic premise is that Judge is having a weird year. He’s absolutely crushing the ball at home. He’s absolutely getting crushed on the road. The difference is striking — most of the key numbers are there in the story.

This is about something a little bit different.

This is about the first thing that I suspect popped into your mind when you saw Aaron Judge’s home and road numbers.

You’ve probably heard Bill James’ thoughts about bullshit. Summing it up, he believes that the world (and more specific to our thoughts, baseball) will always be overwhelmed by BS. Why? Because bullshit has three titanic advantages over real knowledge. It requires no work. It requires no proof. And it’s available to all of us in unlimited supply.

The mind is so good at bullshitting. Give us any odd stat, any surprising fact, any quirk, and our mind will immediately come up with a theory of why it is so. And, remarkably, if you then say, no, actually the exact opposite is true, our mind will immediately shift and give you a theory why THAT is true. We can’t help it. One of my favorite examples involves teams in any sport that sweep in the playoffs and then get a long rest before playing in the next round.

If that team WINS then it is because they got rested, rejuvenated, injured players got healthy, everybody was energized.

If that team LOSES then it is because they got rusty, they lost focus, they lost their edge, they came out flatfooted.

This is pure, unrefined BS. The mind sees effect and seeks cause. Hey, I don’t just do this as often as most people, I do it MUCH MORE than most people. I’m not unaware. I even have a BS theory I threw into the Aaron Judge story. In my defense, I threw it out there as a wild theory that might be worth exploring. At the very least, I don’t believe my own BS.

When you saw Aaron Judge’s home run numbers — using “you” in a general way not you specifically — you thought, “Well, Yankee Stadium is ridiculous hitters ballpark,” didn’t you? You see that over two seasons, he has hit 53 homers at home, 28 on the road, and you thought of that ludicrous right-field fence there, so short, so inviting, and you could just picture Judge poking routine fly balls over that wall, right?

I only suspect you thought that because I thought that. It was the first thing that came to my mind, and I fully intended to write it.

The problem with it is that even a token bit of research shows: It isn’t true.

First of all, Yankee Stadium is NOT a good hitters park for right-handed hitters. It just isn’t. I show a couple of examples of this in the story — Gary Sanchez is a bit worse over his career at Yankee Stadium, Giancarlo Stanton is hitting terribly at Yankee Stadium, and so on. It has been a fantastic home run park for lefties, absolutely, Curtis Granderson mashed there, Raul Ibanez mashed there, Robbie Cano mashed there, but righties? Blech. Remember the Vernon Wells experiment? The Matt Holiday thing? Chris Carter? A-Rod didn’t hit great there. Jeter didn’t hit great there. There’s a long history, going back three ballparks, of Yankee Stadium stifling the life out of right-handed hitters. This version of Yankee Stadium isn’t the right-handed graveyard that Joe DiMaggio played in, but it’s still decidedly a left-handed park.

So, you quickly say (for BS moves faster than the speed of light): Judge is just a different kind of right-handed hitter. He has opposite field power that others lack. He has a knack for poking fly balls the other way.

But does he?

Judge has hit 25 home runs this year. How many do you think were Yankee Stadium pokes to right field of less than, say, 350 feet? I count two — both in the last week, one off Anibal Sanchez and one off Luiz Gohara. The Gohara one was right down the right-field line so it probably would have gone most places. You could argue the 355 foot homer he hit off Anthony Swarzak was a bit of a cheapie, I suppose, though that one would probably have gone out of most parks.

So MAYBE you could say three of his home runs were ballpark enhanced. It’s probably just one.

Anyway, it isn’t just home runs. Judge does everything better at Yankee Stadium. He walks more. He strikes out less. He hits the ball considerably harder at home. His batting average on balls in play at Yankee Stadium this year — and remember, this does not include home runs — is .452. On the road, it’s .250. He showed signs of this last year, especially in the second half; he hit .227 on the road last year after July 4. Everybody talked about what a lousy playoffs he had (.188 average, astounding 27 strikeouts), but he went 7-for-21 with three doubles and three homers at Yankee Stadium. That’s MVP stuff. He only ended up having a lousy overall playoffs because he went 2-for-27 on the road with one extra base hit and 15 strikeouts.

Yes, of course, these are small sample sizes. But for all the world, it appears Aaron Judge is a different hitter at home.

And like most things, the reason defies simple answers, defies BS. Pal and Statcast guru Mike Petriello suggests after some research that Judge actually IS a different hitter at home. He hits the other way more often. He clearly tries to take advantage of the park’s benefits. But he concludes that if Judge is doing that he absolutely should pretend he’s ALWAYS hitting at Yankee Stadium because that approach is simply better for him.

I mentioned above that I offered my own BS guess in the story — I just wonder if Judge is more comfortable not only at Yankee Stadium but in New York. There has been a longstanding theory (which I suspect is mostly BS) that there are players who cannot handle New York, cannot deal with the bigness of the city, the rush, the tabloid back-pages, the cynicism and whatever else. I do know that Yankees officials do spend a lot of time considering this when they acquire players through the draft or trade or free agency.

Well, if that’s true — and I’m not saying it is — maybe the opposite is true as well. Maybe Aaron Judge just thrives in the city.

11 thoughts on “Here comes da Judge”

When people talk about Home Field advantage in different sports, it suprises me that in Baseball, a game that has a specific rule that is makes the game different at home than on the road, namely that you Hit Second, doesn’t get bought up in the discussion. In Penalty Shoot-Outs there is a definite statistically proven advantage to going first in the shoot-out (though strangely at this World Cup everyone who has gone 2nd has won, but still) anyway wouldn’t the fact you get to hit first, or the fact you always get a chance to come back imply an advantage one way or the other that has nothing to do with the home crowd etc

My preferred (because it’s the most fun one to throw out) BS reason is that balls and strikes are called differently for him at home because umps are very intimidated there and Judge has more of a difference than most hitters hitting from ahead instead of behind. As it should be I write this with zero research on any of it.

Joe addresses this in the MLB article, but the key difference is that nearly everyone gets a boost at playing in Coors, (especially pre-humidor), while Judge performs at home far better than his peers do.

Basically (if you buy into this argument), playing Coors is a blanket advantage for anyone who plays there, playing in Yankee Stadium as a righty is not. Judge is doing something that his right-handed peers cannot do to thrive, so he shouldn’t be penalized in the same way someone receiving a blanket boost would.

I think there’s something to be said for sleeping in your own bed at night and eating your own food in your own time zone. I know I’m not at my best after having traveled for a few hours, to a different time zone, slept in a strange bed and ate food I don’t normally eat. Obviously I have zero scientific proof, so I guess it’s BS. But it sounds right and, I feel it would certainly be a factor for me if I was a professional athlete. Take basketball, where all the courts are the same size and of the same construction. I grant that there are minor variances, but the league has moved to minimize those so they should be a minor factor. So, home teams win a great deal of the time. Even bad teams can have decent home records. Travel wears you down. Sleeping at home rejuvenates you. That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.

I will say that when I was reading this article, I had just watched the Braves/Yankees series and saw Judge hit two pretty cheap HRs to right. So it did occur to me that he might be doing that pretty often. It was pretty funny to find out that those two HRs were almost the only cheapies he’s hit this year at home. Small sample size rules!